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The pressure on public companies to boost short-term profits at the expense of long-term growth has increased since the financial crisis, business leaders warned yesterday.

Paul Polman, the chief executive of Unilever, said the huge amounts of money being pumped into the system by central banks had provoked a frantic search for yield among investors which was putting more pressure on companies to focus on short-term returns. “The trends are still in the wrong direction,” he said in an interview with The Times.

Dominic Barton, head of McKinsey, the consultants, said these pressures meant Western public companies were investing much